Short introduction: today I managed to buy tickets for 'Rurouni Kenshin'. It took me more than one hour, half of all my nerves and several litres of tears, changing our plans and changing our plane booking as well as two hotels, but I managed. There was also the option of trying to stand in a queue on a cool April morning in order to buy same-day tickets, but I guess I wanted more certainty and a seat down my bottom.
So, the truth is, I've never seen such an agiotage. Even when I was buying tickets for the final performance of ms. Kiriya, then a top star of Moon - I was not aiming for the closing night, but still. My friend managed to buy tickets for 'Man from Algiers' a couple of days before the actual performance we went to see, and to a performance in Saitama during one of the national tours, which are referred to on takawiki as one of the fast-selling ones. I managed to buy good tickets for 'Puck', which is a revival of a musical staged 20 years ago, so I supposed it would be relatively popular, too. Now I see I didn't know what 'popular' means.
So, Takarazuka has now an official homepage with tickets available for foreign customers. As it requires that you pick up the tickets no later than 15 minutes before the performance starts, all you need is to come in time, day in day, not even a few hours in advance, but just so that you have time to get your tickets and enter the hall.
What I learned today and what I have to share is:
- Tickets on CNPlayguide were sold in 1 minute exactly. Since I'm a registered member there, it was the fastest way for me, so I refreshed the page at 10-00 Japanese time, right when the tickets went to sale, and there were all triangles - it means, there were only up to 10 or up to 50 tickets left for respective shows. I clicked the necessary link and while the page was loading the tickets were gone.
- Tickets on Lawson were sold very fast, but their website, when experiencing traffic congestion, shows you a message that you have to wait (in Japanese AND in English) and you have to wait. As always, don't refresh the page because you'll be sent to the end of the queue. So, you won't even see the available tickets because all you get is the error message in red letters on a white background.
- The official Japanese website also shows a similar message and doesn't let you see the current state of selling.
- Tickets on Eplus were sold very fast, but I couldn't really measure the amount of time because I wasn't interested, since it doesn't accept foreign cards anyway.
- As for the English version of the official website, it does enable you to choose what you want, but when there's a flood of customers it shows you the error message saying they couldn't make a booking for you, as soon as you click 'next' after choosing the date and time and entering basic info about you. The system does not reflect available tickets in real time, so if you don't succeed, you probably chose the wrong performance. I mean wrong as 'no luck'. The official ticket selling system is based on Pia's service and it reloads information about available tickets every something, I'm not sure how fast, but even though the tickets are shown as available, there may be none in reality.
- Opening the official website's ticket selling system in several tabs of the same browser leads to the whole process of booking being cancelled. It's written in the error message you get, so don't try to open the same link twice and clicking on it like crazy. Instead, open several performances you're interested in separately in several different browsers, thus you will escape cancelling. Or try opening in different browsers different types of seats for the same performance.
- In case of extreme congestion you'd probably like to turn on auto-fill if your browser has such a function. It saves time. Because I guess from time to time you'd want to return back and see if the tickets are still on sale.
- So, it took me 44 minutes of constant refreshing, clicking, searching, kicking the table in despair and envisaging how we would be standing in the morning queue for same-day tickets. After that the main flood obviously went down and the website finally began to show the real state of affairs. What I managed to see was that there were still some tickets available for the day that we intended to spend in Osaka, but there wasn't much choice so we went for it - and had to change our flight, hotels and plans. I imagine this system gives you the same 10 minutes for completing your payment as the others do, so when you see you managed to book your tickets, you may breathe out and relax for a couple of moments. Then gather the remaining strength and complete the process as soon as you can.
- Judging by today's experience, S-seats remained on sale the longest, maybe due to their number, because A and B only take one sector of the balcony each, while S-seats take the rest of the hall, excluding the small SS-sector in the middle of the first floor. Previously I thought they were selling faster because they're better.
- And as you may have understood, the only website that was still selling after one hour went by, was the official English website of Takarazuka. All the other 'playguides' sold their share during the first minutes. And I'm not exaggerating, I tell you. The entire month was sold in several minutes. I'd never imagine 'Rurouni Kenshin' was so popular. That means that I'm a naive fool, because my friend told me that the tickets to Grand Theatre were also sold out very quickly, but I preferred to think it was because she went to buy them too late.
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